[IP] Electronic Voting - Is it safe?

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

Title:  Electronic Voting - Is it safe?

------ Forwarded Message
From: Dennis Paull <dpaull@svpal.org>
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 22:13:42 -0700
To: Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>
Subject: Electronic Voting - Is it safe?

Hi Dave,

There is a major battle going on now among those who want to
upgrade voting procedures from manual to electronic systems.

For example, see: http://www.politechbot.com/p-04698.html
                  http://verify.stanford.edu/EVOTE/NEWSLETTERS/v1n2.html
 <http://verify.stanford.edu/EVOTE/NEWSLETTERS/v1n2.html>                   http://verify.stanford.edu/evote.html 

Dr. David Dill, a leading researcher on this topic is the owner
of the evote site at Stanford. He may be reached at:

          "Dr. David Dill" <elections@chicory.stanford.edu>

There is a big problem, however. Most of these new machines
do not supply a voter viewable paper (or other permanent
media) audit trail. The result is that there is no way for
the voters' intent to be recovered other than by trusting
the machine to report truthfully what it thinks the voter 
intended.

Given the huge incentive to bend election results by certain
partisans, and the almost certain occurrence of programming
bugs to crop up, it appears to me to be potentially destructive
of our democratic processes to use these 'black box' voting
machines.

You have probably read of some of the dubious results that
occurred during the '02 election. If not, I can refer you to
suitable sites.

I am asking your opinion as to whether you think a fully
reliable computerized voting machine without voter viewable
audit capability can be constructed. We would also need to 
understand the procedures to be used in testing and certifying 
such a system.

If it is not possible, I hope that you would be willing to
help make the IP subscribers aware of the potential failures
of non-auditable election machines.

Thanks,

Dennis Paull
229 Correas Ave.
Half Moon Bay, CA
650-712-0498
dpaull@svpal.org


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